Does Not Illustrate: Harder Than Hard

The trope isn't "one difficulty is named 'hard' and another is even harder".

These are the difficulty levels that are cranked up to a ridiculous amount, often untested, and sometimes purposefully designed to be impossible. A common trait of these is that they follow up the difficulty selection with "are you ABSOLUTELY SURE you want to do this?"

So a better image would be this one◊ and that◊ combined (selection screen + are you sure).

If the combo looks good at wiki size, that's fine with me.

I think the first screen is enough. The rendering of the letters is enough to show that it's really that hard.

use the second screen for the caption

Good idea.

I have nothing against Doom, but I feel like the whole pic is too similar to something like Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels (it feels similar to the Wolfenstein pic already on it.) and also shows the Easier Than Easy difficulty, muddling it a bit. I get that the Harder Than Hard mode is going to have an idiosyncratic name, but it may be a bit too much to have all levels that way. Maybe this from Bloons Tower Defense 5 (the 6th game has submodes for difficulties which probably wouldn't fit)?

One name is idiosyncratic, but so is using "Zero" on Easier Than Easy's suggestion. If just showing the reward differences is not enough, we could also show differences to Hard mode.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jan 24th 2020 at 4:40:34 PM

Aside from the name, there is nothing indicating that it would be more than just one step above "Hard". The reward scales the same as for the levels before, and frankly, giving an achievement when beating the game in the hardest mode doesn't strike me as extraordinary. Hell, I'd assume that there is an achievement for beating it in each difficulty.

The thing is, the laconic says Harder Than Hard is just "A difficulty level above hard." and Square Peg, Round Trope mentions that "Harder Than Hard refers to when a game has a hard difficulty followed by at least one difficulty above it (for example, difficulty levels with the labels Normal, Hard, and Very Hard). It does not simply mean a hard mode that's much harder than the normal mode, or an extreme case of a Nintendo Hard game." It can be one step above hard. Admittedly, that's what Impoppable is, though it is a clear difference in difficulty from Hard. After all, on Hard you have 100 lives, on Impoppable only 1. And as for the medal, for beating Hard you get gold, for beating Impoppable you get a special one. So I'd say it's still distinct.

Maybe this pic shows it better that it is one step above?

As noted in another thread, laconic pages are notoriously inaccurate; in this case, the laconic is capturing the trope name but not the real meat of the trope.

They may be inaccurate (they WILL be more accurate once they get turned into subtitle markup, let's just work on making current laconic pages better), but if an anti-misuse index also supports the different definition, I'd say we should consider the different one. And really, trying to limit this to just the "difficulty level where failure is simply not possible" would be too stifling, we have fine examples of this trope anyway as is.

(Same post is on Easier Than Easy thread.)

Edited by Piterpicher on Jan 24th 2020 at 8:35:14 PM

Lunatic mode from Touhou Imperishable Night? Not sure if it's readable at wiki size, though.

EDIT: Uh, yeah, it's not.

I wonder if the Touhou pics from ImageLinks.Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels can illustrate. I like the one from Ten Desires◊.

Edited by TrueShadow1 on Jan 25th 2020 at 9:21:45 PM

Me too. That Ten Desires idea was great. Plus the fact that each level is labeled Easy, Normal, Hard, and Lunatic makes it more distinguishable than your typical Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels.

I can get behind the Ten Desires one, but only if you crop out the irrelevant difficulties (Easy and Normal).

You don't really need them.

Edited by Drope on Jan 26th 2020 at 2:46:25 AM

I'd be down with that.

Edited by Willbyr on Jan 26th 2020 at 5:32:23 AM

I'd at least keep Normal (some games tend to start with Hard mode, like Super Hexagon, and I did that with my Easier Than Easy suggestion, and it doesn't take up much space).

I tried using an actual in-game screenshot, but the Hard Mode text is barely visible

So, the image link, but cropped.

With Normal mode:

Without Normal mode:

Nice work. I prefer the three-difficulty version, but the two-diff one is also fine.

Is it possible to get better quality versions? It may be the monitor I'm using but those look really grainy.

Here's a PNG version of the 3-panel one...I made it to 300 px.